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\"Behind India's high recent growth rates lies a story of societal conflict that is scarcely talked about. Across production sites, state institutions and civil society organisations, the dominant and less well-off sections of society are engaged in a protracted conflict that determines the material conditions of one quarter of the world's 'poor'. Increasingly mobile, and often engaged in multiple occupations in multiple locations, India's 'classes of labour' are highly segmented, but far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Drawing on detailed fieldwork in rural South India over more than a decade, the book uses a 'class-relational' approach that focuses on 'the poor's' iniquitous relations with others, and views class in terms of contested social relations rather than structural locations marked by particular characteristics. The book explores continuity and change amongst forms of accumulation, exploitation and domination in three interrelated arenas of class relations: labour relations, the state and civil society. Marginal gains for labour derived from structural change are contested by capital, local state institutions and state poverty reduction programmes tend to be controlled by the dominant class, and civil society organisations tend to reproduce rather than challenge the status quo. On the other hand, elements of state policy have the capacity to improve the material conditions of 'the poor' where such ends are actively pursued by labouring class organisations. It is argued that social policy currently provides the most fertile terrain for redistributing power and resources to the labouring class, and may clear the way for more fundamental transformations.\"

From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, Tyler Stovall explores the nature of working-class life and politicization as he skillfully documents how this unique region and political culture came into being. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt reveals that the very process of urban development in metropolitan Paris and the suburbs provided the most important opportunities for the local establishment of Communist influence.   The rapid increase in Paris' suburban population during the early twentieth century outstripped the development of the local urban infrastructure. Consequently, many of these suburbs, often represented to their new residents as charming country villages, soon degenerated into suburban slums. Stovall argues that Communists forged a powerful political block by mobilizing the disillusionment and by improving some of the worst aspects of suburban life.   As a social history of twentieth-century France, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt calls into question traditional assumptions about the history of both French Communism and the French working-class. It suggests that those interested in working-class politics should consider the significance of residential and consumer issues as well as those relating to the workplace. It also suggests that urban history and urban development should not be considered autonomous phenomena, but rather expressions of class relations. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt brings to life a world whose citizens, though often overlooked, are nonetheless the history of modern France.  This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of \"inequality regimes\" as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs.

What is the impact of social class on college integration? Higher education institutions are becoming more diverse, yet the integration of underprivileged students remains a challenge. Using a social network approach, we analyze the general integration of low socioeconomic status (SES) students, as well as how segregated by class these friends are. The object of analysis is the extreme case of an elite university that, based on a government loan program (Ser Pilo Paga), opened its doors to many low-SES students in a very unequal country, Colombia. Using a mixed methods perspective, including a survey, 61 in depth interviews, and ethnographic observation, we analyze friendship networks and their meanings, barriers, and facilitators. Contrary to the literature, we find that low-SES students had, on average, the same number of connections and were no more isolated than students from upper social classes. Also, low-SES students’ networks were not more segregated, even if relations with the upper classes were less likely and required more relational work than with middle or lower class friends. This high level of social integration stemmed from the intense relational work that low-SES students engage in, so as to fit in. Middle class friends act as a catalyst that can enable cross-class friendships.

This article explores how white working-class women are figured as the constitutive limit — in proximity — to national public morality. It is argued that four processes: increased ambivalence generated by the reworking of moral boundaries; new forms of neo-liberal governance in which the use of culture is seen as a form of personal responsibility by which new race relations are formed; new ways of investing in one's self as a way of generating exchange-value via affects and display; and the shift to compulsory individuality are reshaping class relations via the making of the self. By showing and telling themselves in public white working-class women are forced to display their 'lack' of moral value according to the symbolic values generated by the above processes. It is a no-win situation for them unless we shift our perspective from exchange-value to use-value.

This article analyses why informal labourers working 'at the margins' of global production networks lack 'structural' and 'associational' power. It does so in order to better understand potential changes in their material and political conditions, and as part of broader calls to put labour at the centre of development studies. The article focuses on rural-based labourers in south India who work relatively invisibly as agricultural labourers and informal factory workers, and on the construction sites of a 'global city' (Bangalore). It deploys a three-way labour control regime framework that encompasses (1) the macro-labour control regime, which is ultimately defined by capitalist relations of production, and characterised in India by particularly high levels of informality (precarious and largely unregulated work) and segmentation (due to the fragmentary impact of caste); (2) the local labour control regime, which refers to how class relations in specific places are shaped by patterns of accumulation and work (themselves shaped by differences in agro-ecology, irrigation, and remoteness from non-agricultural labour markets), distributions of classes and castes, and the uneven presence of the state; and (3) the labour process, which is increasingly marked by forms of 'remote control' marshalled by labour intermediaries. Debate on the macro-labour control regime and on the labour process is well established, but little has been said about local labour control regimes, which are newly defined here and discussed in terms of differences between 'wetland/circulation zones' and 'dryland/commuting zones'. The article identifies locations where labour has greater potential structural and associational power. Increased worker organisation in these areas could have knock-on effects in more 'obscure' sites.

This article argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. The article illustrates and explains the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences.

With unprecedented subtlety, compassion and richness of detail, Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars. Focusing on families from regions across America and of differing races and ethnicities, she argues that working-class families of the time were not on the verge of entering the middle class and embracing mass culture. Rather, she contends that during the interwar period such families lived in a context of scarcity and limited resources, not plenty. Their consumption, Benson argues, revolved around hard choices about basic needs and provided therapeutic satisfactions only secondarily, if at all. Household Accountsis rich with details Benson gathered from previously untapped sources, particularly interviews with women wage earners conducted by field agents of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. She provides a vivid picture of a working-class culture of family consumption: how working-class families negotiated funds; how they made qualitative decisions about what they wanted; how they determined financial strategies and individual goals; and how, in short, families made ends meet during this period. Topics usually central to the histories of consumption-he development of mass consumer culture, the hegemony of middle-class versions of consumption, and the expanded offerings of the marketplace-contributed to but did not control the lives of working-class people. Ultimately,Household Accountsseriously calls into question the usual narrative of a rising and inclusive tide of twentieth-century consumption.